Ben Cohen’s Crazy Money-Marking Contraption

Ben Cohen, the first half of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, wanted to take on the man. So he enlisted the San Francisco maker community, and built a noisy, carnivalesque, vaudeville-style device, full of bright-colored wood and plastic and metal, to drive around the country and stamp slogans on money.

More specifically, Cohen wanted to run a publicity campaign against the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that allows corporations to contribute unreservedly to political campaigns, though not to candidates or parties. As part of his campaign, which he calls a “stamp stampede,” Cohen envisioned a playful, mobile stamping machine that would print slogans on bills, a sort of political Rube Goldberg device mounted on the back of a Chevy 3500 truck. He calls it the Stampmobile, or sometimes, the Amend-o-Matic.

“I’ve been doing mobile promotional vehicles for a long time,” Cohen says. “Somehow, I have it in my head that it’s a really effective way of breaking through the clutter and interacting with people … I see it as a really cost-effective form of guerrilla marketing.”

The Stampmobile, conceived by Cohen and neuroscientist-artist Alan Rorie, was designed to carry a dollar bill, on a roller-coaster like track, up and through a series of kinetic sculptures, and into a stamping device that would emblazon it with one of four slogans: “stamp money out of politics”; “corporations are not people, money is not free speech”; “the system isn’t broken, it’s fixed”; and “not to be used for bribing politicians.”

“It’s great using art for the sake of political action, activism,” Cohen says. “You gotta make it fun, and this makes it fun.”

Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

As with a lot of projects, the Stampmobile’s fabrication didn’t go quite as planned. To complete it in time for his planned cross-country tour, and a press event in Los Angeles, Cohen sent an S.O.S. into the maker community. Within hours, he’d enlisted Gian Pablo Villamil and a team full of varied strengths and backgrounds and found a space, in an old hangar on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, to wrap up the project.

That’s where Wired Design found the team last Wednesday, performing more than just minor tweaks, just a few hours before the vehicle’s scheduled departure. The Stampmobile was built; it just didn’t work.

“Almost everything was prototyped separately, and it worked, but when you put it all together, it didn’t work. Nothing worked,” says Villamil. “It’s always tricky to inherit a project from somebody else. So we spent basically a day getting to know the thing.”

The carts that carry the bills along a track made of high-density polyethylene tubing weren’t making it up to the peak of the coaster. A rotating wooden tower was supposed to push the carts in an ascending spiral, but the motor was either too fast at 12 volts, causing the carts to bang the sides and get hung up, or underpowered at 5 volts, stopping altogether. When the Stampmobile finally hit the road, around midnight, the carts were making it up at the slower speed. Not ideal, says Villamil, but at least it worked.

“It’s one of those things, it’s the last step, you just want it to go well. It’s disappointing if it stops right here,” says Jenn Mann, who added an angled metal guide to help the carts slide smoothly into the stamper.

“It’s that last 5 percent that just takes forever,” she says.

Alan Rorie, with an early prototype of the coaster. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The nuances in Citizens United dictate that to overturn it would require a constitutional amendment — no easy accomplishment. It’s political, but it’s not about a party, Cohen says.

“We knew that people were going to be more attuned to this issue of money in politics because of the election,” he says, noting that the plan is to have the Stampmobile active well beyond November, for years if necessary.

The irony of using money to fight money is not lost on Cohen, nor are the potential legal issues. The U.S. Department of the Treasury notes two laws that could come into play: one says messing with money with the intent to render the currency unfit to be reissued is illegal; the other says it’s illegal to attach or print advertisements. While the Treasury can’t comment on the legality of this campaign specifically, Cohen had a lawyer look into it, and he says neither applies. He certainly doesn’t want to take the bills out of circulation — having them there is the whole point.

Move to Amend, a coalition dedicated to eliminating money as a form of free speech, also ran an Indiegogo campaign, which raised more than $36,000 for the Stampede. But a crowdsourced project is nothing without the people who build it, and this one almost fell through.

“It’s been so great having the support of the San Francisco community,” Cohen says, who flew to the bay for the final stages of the project. “It’s hard on the East Coast. We don’t have a community like this, at least not in Vermont.”

“We just put so much into it. No, it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t happen.”

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